The gift of life

A forlorn 1960s tri-level that escaped tear-down status gets another chance in the hands of Donna Howarth, who knows about beating the odds

May 04, 2008|BY LISA SKOLNIK and Lisa Skolnik, a frequent contributor, is a city editor for Metropolitan Home.

Donna Howarth doesn't believe that you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. "I've always been pretty good at making the most out of tough situations," she says. Her picturesque Barrington home-a cottage-quaint, spacious, whitewashed affair on a pastoral five-acre pond-and an 18-year-long battle with ovarian cancer, prove her point. Both have forced her to find new ways of dealing with life. In 1999, she and her husband, Bill, planned to move to an island retreat off the coast of Maine. They were derailed by a recurrence of Donna's cancer, which she already had been battling for nine years. Yet with the kind of steely determination that helped her survive the disease ("which usually kills its victims within five years of diagnosis," she says), they decided to look for a place with land and a view, closer to their family and her medical team.

The one property their real estate agent reluctantly showed them became Donna's silk purse. It was a bare-bones, rundown, 1960s pinkish brick tri-level on a barren lot the same size as the pond, with overgrown shrubs and heavy drapes totally blocking all the views. But when Donna walked the property, took in the sightlines and spotted the weathered red wood equestrian barn then being used for storage, she knew she could transform it "from an ugly duckling into a swan."

Her architect, Thomas Reed, and husband, Bill, did not concur. "Tom told me 'Run, don't walk, away from this.'" She countered: "You're just going to have to squint and see my vision here. This can work." Bill, already wise to her talents, thought the property "was lovely but the house was hopeless."

"But when she does something, it always turns out better than I expect," he said.

Six months later they moved in, even though Donna had just undergone an ineffective bone marrow transplant and was in the midst of a course of chemotherapy. "I needed to live there while we did the work so I could figure out what to do and feel how the space was shaping up. So we made a little nest on the second floor and set up a kitchen in the basement," she explains.

Donna's plans for the place were inspired by living in it: "I wanted to give the house character, make it look as old as possible and maximize every view."

Some things were obvious from the start.

Donna immediately put the barn back to work with her own menagerie: three pygmy goats and a flock of chickens. Bill surprised her with a pair of sheep a few months later, on Mother's Day. She painted both barn and house a soft white to give them a relationship to each other and allow the character of the brick and wood to show through. "We diluted the paint and had it applied it with large sponges to give it that worn appearance," she says.

Donna also knew that "the rest of the property needed gardens to enhance the beautiful views that already existed." A thick, ugly asphalt driveway to a three-car garage facing the pond had to go.

Landscape designer Pete Wodarz helped her plan and plant flower and vegetable gardens to enrich the rolling lawns, while Reed acted as adviser when she tore out the asphalt, turned the gigantic garage into a family room lined with French doors and replaced the driveway with an arbor-topped terrace overlooking a pool and the pond beyond.

Inside, Donna slowly but surely redid every inch of the house. "As we took on each project, Tom would stop by, we'd brainstorm and he would sketch things out. A lot of times, we'd sit around, scratch our heads, realize it doesn't look right, then try to figure out why. Sometimes we'd even set up mock furniture to get a feeling for something and have visuals on what we were talking about, like cabinet heights . . . or hang paper templates to see how an arched doorway would look," she recalls.

Today, "whatever you're looking at never was. We kept the basic footprint of the house, but nothing else is the same. Every single door and window has changed, every room is in a different spot and we've added a whole new wing with a master suite and three-car garage," says Donna. By replacing the home's original single-hung windows with larger, double-hung windows and French doors, every room was infused with much more light. And the addition took the house from 3,000 to 5,700 square feet, while the room swaps put the most important spaces, such as the family room and kitchen, in full view of the pond.

But a few special tricks Donna devised do the most to make the house look like a charming country home that has been gracing the property since the 1930s.